The course Personal Skills - Design Thinking is a compact and intensive course designed to educate, empower and inspire participants to develop creative and user-oriented solutions to complex problems. Design Thinking allows organizations to understand their customers and potential future users, challenge previous assumptions, redefine problems and create innovations in an iterative process. It represents a universal creative technique applicable to diverse contexts.

The course will provide students with insights into the basics, the process and the application of the Design Thinking method along the five phases: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Testing. Students will improve their creativity and problem-solving skills, which will allow them to drive entrpereneurial activities in their environment.

The curriculum starts with a brief theoretical background on well-established concepts. The central part will cover various interactive group exercises in which students will apply Design Thinking and practice their presentation skills.

All sessions will be held syncronous.

After completing this course, students will have the ability to:

• Understand how to use Design Thinking for creative problem solving
• Take a structured approach to identifying needs not being met
• Apply various creative techniques to generate ideas
• Apply rapid protoyping for iterative testing and feedback loops to review and advance approaches and assumptions

Attendance: To pass this course, your absence is limited to 20% of our appointments.

Please note that full-time presence on the first day of the course is obligatory!

The course will combine various learning methods to deliver different topics to the students. These will include theory input, open class discussion, interactive teamwork, presentations, and hands-on exercises.

50% in-class trainings (group assessment)

30% in-class training (individual assessment)

20% reflection paper (individual assessment)

Grading scale:

Excellent (1): 87.51% - 100.00%

Good (2): 75.01% - 87.50%

Satisfactory (3): 62.51% - 75.00%

Sufficient (4): 50.00% - 62.50%

Fail (5): <50.00%

None

carola.wandres@wu.ac.at